


Sounds Like Something Out of Science-Fiction

by illa_dixit



Series: Space!AU [1]
Category: One Piece
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-20
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-08 13:29:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10387689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illa_dixit/pseuds/illa_dixit
Summary: Luffy is really good at making friends. Luffy's friends are getting better and better at dealing with the consequences of this, which include but are not limited to: fighting jerks, running away from the marines, and getting to know giant space whales on a more personal level than they ever thought was possible.Or, "in which everything is pretty much the same, but in space"





	1. Space Is Big

**Author's Note:**

> “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. 
> 
> There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”  
> ― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

_**SPACE IS BIG.** _

He hasn’t eaten in 12 days.

It’s not the longest Zoro’s gone without, but it _is_ the first time they’ve not given him water, either, and it’s been a few days since the last rainstorm. He’s trying to meditate through it, but honestly his ability to concentrate is starting to suffer and instead he just finds himself drifting.

 _30 days_ , the Ringmaster had said, dispassionately, when the guards had finally managed to get him tied to this fucking post. No one’s survived that long, but he’s going to be the first. It won’t mean his freedom, but it will mean he gets thrown back into the cages until the next time he’s scheduled for a fight, and he’s already sworn he won’t die on this sorry excuse for a planet so that’s that. He’s got better shit to do, if he can ever buy his way out.

(No one’s ever bought their way out. It’s theoretically possible, but they all seem to draw the ire of the guards, of the Ringmaster, just before they reach it and are knocked down to nothing again. Zoro has been close enough to taste freedom twice, and here he is once again on his way to the bottom.)

Distantly, he becomes aware that he’s being watched. The attention doesn’t feel hostile though, so Zoro takes his time opening his eye (the left had been lost to one of the fights about a year ago, but the scar was clean and he’d learned to compensate for the blind spot pretty quickly). There is a boy standing in the yard, surprisingly close. He’d thought he was paying attention, clearly the hunger is getting to him. Pathetic, he must be stronger than that.

The boy examines him solemnly. He stares back. The boy has a head of wild dark hair, barely tamed by a battered straw hat, and isn’t wearing shoes. There’s a poorly healed scar under his eye, but he’s got both of them so Zoro has no sympathy there.

Suddenly, the boy nods, once and firmly, before his face splits into a wide grin.

“Hi, I’m Luffy! You should join my crew!”

Zoro stares at him. The boy continues to grin back.

“… why?” He manages, eventually, and it sounds painfully rough and dry.

“Well, you’re strong, right? And I’m gonna be the Pirate King, so I need strong guys on my crew! Oh, but I know you’re not a jerk! You’re here because you wouldn’t fight that girl, right? And then killed those dogs for her! I met her mom in the market today, she told me all about it. Yep, it’s settled, you’re exactly the guy for my crew!”

This Luffy guy is clearly an idiot. He does seem to know who Zoro is (not surprising, if he’s from the East Cluster - Zoro is, apparently, a bit of a household name. Not that he’d know.), which means he’s got to know that Zoro’s a gladiator, a slave who fights for nothing but survival and the tantalizing possibility of freedom (the possibility to fight for something else, to fight to simply be the best). He’s not a free agent who can just join whatever crew he wants.

“Can’t.” Zoro says, and watches as Luffy’s grin fades, replaced by a surprisingly serious expression.

“Sure you can. You’re your own person.”

Zoro can actually feel his jaw drop open. There are no words. He manages to wrench one of his wrists into cooperating so he can just (clumsily, due to being tied to a fucking post) point at the collar around his neck as he glares at this straw-hatted idiot.

Luffy narrows his eyes and walks in closer. “That doesn’t mean they own you. Not here-“ he reaches out and puts his palm flat on Zoro’s chest, over his heart. “-and not in your dreams.”

The serious face is gone, as suddenly as it appeared, replaced by the sunny grin from earlier. “You’ve got a dream right? I know the look! Just like I’m be Pirate King! Hey, Zoro, what do you wanna do?”

Zoro stares at him, a barefoot boy with an innocent face, and is speaking before he realizes what’s happening.

“Be the greatest swordsman in the Galaxy. I… promised.”

Luffy’s grin somehow widens. The stretch of it should look unnatural, but seems perfectly at home on his face. “Great! So what are you waiting for? Join my crew!”

 

* * *

 

“Wanna join my crew?”

“No way! I’m a thief! And I hate pirates!”

“Awwww, but you’re so cool! And so good at piloting~! Zoro and I nearly died three times on the way here, haha, hey what’s this button do?”

Nami slaps a wandering hand away from the button that will open the airlock and kill them all very dead in the sad, cold, blackness of space, and turns away from the screens to scold Luffy for daring to enter her personal space, and freezes.

She doesn’t scream only because long years of being a thief have taught her that screaming is generally a more effective way to get shot when something catches you by surprise. Luffy’s hand is still over by her, but the rest of him is clear on the other side of the shuttle, a distance of at least three meters. Between hand and body is _way_ too much damned arm.

 “I… didn’t know you could do that.” Nami manages eventually, and tries to cover how grateful she is when Luffy’s arm snaps back to its normal length.

“Oh yeah! I’m a rubber man! It’s genemedics or whatever.” He hooks a finger in his mouth and stretches his check out half a meter to the left. “Cool, right?”

She flicks her gaze over to where Zoro is pointedly not-sleeping in the corner. His eye is opened, but he doesn’t seem alarmed, so clearly this isn’t unusual.

Fantastic. As if being spacejacked by pirates wasn’t enough, she’s been spacejacked by an idiot genmod and someone who _doesn’t give a fuck that his partner in crime is an idiot genmod._

“Uh, sure.” An alert beeps on the control panel behind her, and she turns back to the business of getting them safely to the next planet in the system on this hunk of junk. Although that beep is, it turns out, important, and she frowns and does some math.

“Hey, we can’t make it to the next planet with this alert – there’s a thing that’s gotta be fixed dirtside. I can get us to a little moon not far from here, though, if that’s OK?”

Zoro hums noncommittally from his corner – his eye is closed when she looks over. She’s not sure what that means, is quickly distracted by Luffy (all of him, this time, thankfully) leaning excitedly over her shoulder and peering at the screens.

“A Mystery Moon! Let’s go! Oh, but join my crew!”

“NO!” 

* * *

 

“Well, I guess this is goodbye.”

“Whaaat? Why? Aren’t you coming with us?”

“Huh, I didn’t think, I mean- you… want me on your crew?”

“Just get on already!”

“Yeah, I’ll take off without you!”

“C’mon Usopp! Of course I want you to join my crew! Let’s go!”

“O-okay!”

_In later retellings of The Tale of the Great Captain Usopp’s Triumphant Alliance with the Strawhat Crew, this exchange will be heavily edited. It has been preserved here for historic accuracy, thanks to a grainy home-video film of the four setting off from Syrup found in the archives of a Miss Kaya. Unfortunately, the rest of the true details have been lost to time, Luffy’s terrible memory, Zoro’s lack of giving a fuck, and Nami’s grudging willingness to humor Usopp’s favorite hobby of telling increasingly elaborate stories about how he joined the crew._

* * *

 

Four, Sanji thinks, is probably too small a number of people to be wandering around space with. Particularly in this part of East – even though the East cluster has a reputation for being one of the quieter parts of the Galaxy, this system will absolutely chew you up and spit you out if you underestimate it. The small crew that’s just pulled into the Baratie, well, crashed into it, really, if you want to be technical, doesn’t seem on the surface like a group of people who have correctly estimated it. The captain is still practically a child, and this impression not negated by his guileless grin and enthusiasm for new things and the fact that it is his fault they crashed into Sanji’s home, and the other three seem to be going along with it, which doesn’t feel like a good sign.

But the captain, Luffy, had introduced himself and claimed responsibility and offered to make it up to them (it turns out that Luffy is _useless_ as a chore boy, though, what the fuck was Zeff thinking, they’re going to be stuck with these idiots for years). And their navigator, a gorgeous redhead named Nami, is, well, gorgeous and if she’s got to stick around while her dumbass captain pays off his debt that’s just more time Sanji gets to know her and impress her with his cooking.

To that end, he’s currently pulling double duty as chef and waiter, since for some reason no one wants to work as wait staff on a space-station that operates more or less entirely as a restaurant out in the black, which barely turns a profit and – according to the last guy to quit, last week – is run by assholes. Sanji can’t actually argue with that, seeing as he and his old man are kind of assholes, particularly to each other, but he can and does feel irrationally offended on Zeff’s behalf. Anyway, double duty is a lot of work and kind of exhausting but he likes it, likes getting to see people eating his food and watching their reactions as they try the first bite of something.

Nami has been gratifyingly impressed by everything, humming happily at the fruit-filled drinks and light soup he’s dropped off so far. Usopp, who claims to be the best gunner in the cluster (Sanji has his doubts, given the fact that the only projectile he’s seen this crew handle so far is their own _damned ship_ and it didn’t even manage to hit the airlock properly which is why they’re stuck here in the first place) is also open and vocal about his enjoyment, and is actually more overtly friendly about it. He strikes up conversation with Sanji and is clearly impressed when he finds out that Sanji is the one who made the soup, offers up praise readily and Sanji can’t help but meet his grin.

The last member, though, Sanji is definitely less sure of. Zoro is much harder to read than the other three, and his neutral face is kind of pissing Sanji off, especially when he doesn’t touch any of the food in front of him in favor of continuing to warily scan the restaurant with a hand dangling too-casually next to the hilts of his swords – and honestly, who the fuck even needs three swords? What the hell is this guy overcompensating for?

Unfortunately, he’s distracted from fuming over the green-haired asshole who isn’t eating his, frankly delicious, soup by an even bigger, pink-hair asshole in the other corner who keeps complaining. This one wears a Marine uniform, which means Sanji’s not really inclined to like him in the first place even if he _is_ a paying customer (as an in-uniform Marine, he’s actually even more of a paying customer than the average – Patty had special menus made up a few years back). He was willing to deal with it, though, before the fucker purposefully ruined his own food and then threw it on the ground.

What the fuck, seriously, this is _space_ why on earth would you waste food like that? Entitled jerk.

The marine is glaring at him, which means Sanji probably said that in his outside voice. Oh, well, he thinks, in for a penny and all, before giving in to his temper and kicking the man in the face.

“I don’t mess with anyone’s food, ass-hat, and don’t you fucking forget it. If I want to hurt you, I will do it to your face. It’s got nothing to do with whether or not I’ll feed you.”

(He’s not too busy being angry about this whole ordeal to notice that the green-haired idiot in the corner starts eating the soup as the marine storms out and ends the display. He’s never too busy to notice people’s relationship with food – it’s what makes him such a damned good chef in the first place.)

* * *

 

“Hey old man! If I kick this guy’s ass, that’d pay you back, right?”

“Sure.” Says Zeff evenly, over the protests of most of the staff. “He’s fair game now that he’s been fed.”

“Haha, you’re weird! I like it!” Luffy says, grinning, and turns towards the hulking figure of Don Krieg in the doorway. “Hey you! Fight me! I’m gonna kick your ass!”

“This is just… something he does, isn’t it?” Usopp says faintly, from his position doing a very good job of hiding behind Zoro without actually broadcasting that that’s what he’s doing. “That thing with the cat guys wasn’t a fluke.”

“Nah,” says Zoro with a feral-looking grin at the same time as Nami yells “No, because he’s an idiot who makes friends too quickly!” and throws her hands up in the air.

“Eh, seems to work out OK.” Zoro says, and they all turn back to watch Luffy throw a stretched-out punch at the asshole who’s invaded the Baratie and is thanking them for their hospitality by insisting he’s taking it over as a ship for his armada. Idiot, the Baratie is a space _station._ It’s designed to stay _stationary_ , more or less, in space, and doesn’t have very many thrusters – there’s no way it can keep up with a ship actually designed to go other places.

“So Sanji,” Nami asks conversationally as they watch the fight start to unfold. “You know you could have avoid this by not feeding those guys, right?”

Sanji resists the urge to snap at her, because it wouldn’t do to lose his temper at a lady.

“Sure, but then they’d have been starving still. There’s something I can do about that, so I’m gonna.”

Usopp throws him a look but seems accepting enough when he comments, “You take food pretty seriously, huh?”

“Yes.” Says Sanji firmly, and then, “excuse me, that idiot with the shields looks like he’s about to try and do something stupid like take a hostage.”

As he bounces off an empty table and kicks at the idiot with the shields, he distantly make out Patty yelling something about an incoming warlord’s ship, followed pretty closely by someone saying “Holy shit, it’s Mihawk” which is in turn followed by a chorus of “Zoro, don’t you dare!” by Nami and Usopp.

He’s not really paying attention after that, though, too busy kicking in the faces of smug assholes who think that holding innocent women hostage is the best way to get an advantage in a fight.

* * *

 

“How the fuck did I end up agreeing to go anywhere with you idiots?” Sanji questions, staring up at the imposing walls that surround Arlong’s compound. The four of them are chasing after Nami, who has made it pretty clear she doesn’t want to be chased after. But they’d found her sister in town, who had told them part of the story, and Luffy had insisted that Nami had to tell him to his face if she didn’t want to be on his crew anymore (“I thought she never technically joined in the first place?” Usopp asks Zoro, who grunts in a way that apparently means ‘yes, but since when has that stopped him’ and really who can argue with that flawless logic?), so here they are.

“I ask myself the same thing every day.” Usopp assures him, as Luffy giggles. “Look, how’re we supposed to get in here?”

“Like this!” Luffy declares, and cups his hands around his mouth to yell up at the top of the walls. “HEY ARLONG! NAMI DOESN’T LIKE YOU! I’M GONNA KICK YOUR ASS!”

Sanji and Usopp both burry their hands in their faces while Zoro grins. Who the fuck knows why the swordsman is looking to pick fights, since his last one certainly didn’t go well and he’s definitely not in any shape to be doing anything what with the giant wound across his entire torso.

“Definitely a thing.” Usopp says, and they all square up in anticipation of getting their asses kicked by a compound full of fishmen (fucking genmods, Luffy’s the first one Sanji’s ever met who isn’t a complete jerk).

“Cheer up,” Sanji offers, savoring the cigarette he’s smoking - since he’s not in a tiny canister of air in the vacuum of space, he can actually use on that produces real smoke, lit from a real match. “I’ve heard bad choices make good stories.”

* * *

 

The next time Luffy asks Nami to join his crew, she bursts into tears for the third time that day, punches him in the arm, and says yes. Luffy insists that Sanji make a cake to celebrate, and that they’re all gonna have a party with the rest of the settlement’s population. Usopp tells increasingly improbable versions of the story of his fight against one of the fishmen, Luffy sings off-key and drags more or less everyone into a complicated dance that he doesn’t actually know the stops for, and Zoro finds himself sitting off to the side, sharing a bottle of what’s actually pretty nice liquor with Nami. It’s a little bubble of quiet amidst the chaos, and he’s content to keep his eye on his crew and relax a little with a large rock firmly against his back.

“Hey,” Nami says suddenly, and he turns to her with an eyebrow up in silent question. “Thanks. For, you know.”

He passes her the bottle rather than reply, and is rewarded with a smile as she takes it and drinks.

He does know. That’s enough.

Later, back on the ship, Zoro takes his usual late watch and Nami gets them out of atmo before setting a course for Logue, the last planet on the outermost edge of the furthest system out from the center of East Cluster. It’s the first stop for anyone arriving in East, and the last for anyone looking to get to Central and the Grand Line. For them, it’s just the next step in the journey.

It’s finally starting to feel like a place where he can let his guard down, this little caravel that only has four other living souls aboard. Zoro’s a little startled to realize that he trusts all of them – has, since Luffy got him out of the arena and Usopp stood up against the cat idiot and Nami managed to set off an avalanche when it looked like they were losing against the fishmen (well, after metaphorically stabbing them in the back, but she wasn’t very good at it, so how much did it really matter?).

Even Sanji, who absolutely rubs Zoro in all the wrong ways for reasons he can’t quite articulate. Who dresses like a smug, self-absorbed asshole but is horrified by the thought of anyone going hungry and has already picked up several tricks to get Luffy to eat more vegetables. Who-

Who is coming into the helm, actually, holding a plate and with a pair of frankly dorky glasses pushed up on top of his head.

“Here,” he says, shoving the plate and a fork at Zoro and sliding the glasses on to peer at the monitors.

Zoro glances at the clock and guesses that it is, actually a reasonable time for his shift to be over. Everyone else is still asleep, but Sanji has already established that he favors the very early morning as a time to take watch so that he has some time before he has to start breakfast.

Belatedly, he vacates the chair (it’s the only one in the room – the Merry is nice but “compact” is probably the most generous way to describe it) and accepts the plate. It’s full of rice and some kind of stir fry, and smells delicious.

He’s apparently not as subtle as he’d thought about inspecting it because Sanji frowns and says “oh, for the love of- here.”

The cook grabs the fork back, scoops up a bite at random from the plate, and sticks it in his own mouth, keeping eye contact with Zoro the entire time.

“I don’t mess with food,” Sanji says firmly, after swallowing, and hands the fork back to Zoro. “Food is for providing nourishment and comfort, not… whatever the fuck’s been done to yours in the past.”

Zoro glares at him. “You don’t know anything about my past.”

Sanji rolls his eyes. “Please. I _did_ grow up in East, and most patrons were into the fights at some point. I know you were in the arenas, and I know that you were there and winning for an unusually long time for an unmodified human. I can see with my eyes that you’re not as well-fed as you should be, particularly not for someone who does as much physical activity as you do. I also know that you’re suspicious of everything I’ve ever seen anyone hand you to eat or drink, and only go for it after someone else has. It’s not about knowing that something’s happened, specifically, just about putting the pieces together.”

Zoro continues to glare, but shoves some of the food into his mouth, more to be contrary than because he’s actually hungry. It’s annoyingly good.

Sanji goes back to watching the screens, Zoro sits down on the floor to finish the food, and they exist for a little while in an awkward, slightly angry silence.

When he gets up to go put the dish in the kitchen and get some sleep, the only reason he notices Sanji’s posture change is because he’s spent literally most of his life watching other people’s bodies in order to survive and it’s a hard habit to break. He keeps watching, more carefully now, as he reaches for the button to open the door, and the blond honestly _flinches._

Zoro thinks about it for a second, and is pretty sure he can’t remember seeing Sanji alone at all in the week or so that they’ve known each other. He’s always with someone else, and the Merry is small enough that the dining/living area and the kitchen are the same room, so even when he’s doing a solo task like cooking, someone else is in the room doing their own solo task.

Wordlessly, he sets down the dish on the side of the navigational panel that doesn’t have any pressure sensitive buttons, trying to play off like that was his intention the whole time, before settling back down onto the floor – slightly closer to Sanji this time, within reach – and closing his eye.

He listens to Sanji’s breathing even out from an edge of panic into his normal rate, and pretends to sleep for the rest of Sanji’s shift.

Nothing happens, and neither of them talk about it.

The next night, when they go through the whole charade again, Zoro is surprised to find he actually falls asleep, for real.

He certainly does trust these people then. It even looks like that trust isn’t going to bite him in the ass, which is new and exciting.

* * *

 

Loguetown is a bustling space port, which has recently updated its reputation from “lousy with crime” to “don’t fuck with Captain Smoker, no really, he’s routed basically all of the disreputable elements who’d set up permanent shop and he will kick your ass,” which is great for the honest citizens of the galaxy trying to make a living in a bustling space port, but less great for Usopp and Nami, who are trying to persuade the newly wanted members of his crew to keep it the fuck on the down low.

“Haha, this is great!” Luffy declares, looking at the holoboard holding bounty announcements. Staring back at him is his own grinning face, under heading **‘WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE: ‘STRAWHAT’ MONKEY D. LUFFY’** and above a reward definitely high enough for someone to cause trouble about it if he gets recognized. “Hey look, Zoro’s got one too! His looks so cool!”

Nami peers at the poster with Zoro’s face on it. It is, admittedly, a pretty cool picture, when you didn’t know the circumstances under which it was taken (namely, that the blood covering him is his own, the idiot, and that the reason he’s glaring so hard is probably because he was in pain from pulling all his stitches from his stupid fight with the galaxy’s greatest swordsman a day and a half before his stupid fight with fishmen), and the nickname “Pirate Hunter” is probably an upgrade from “Three Swords”, which is what he was called when he was still a gladiator. The reward money below it is lower that Luffy’s but respectable.

There is a second poster with Zoro’s face on it, on the next holoboard over, which has a much higher number on it – this one was issued by the arena who still owns his contract, not the Worlds’ Government, and is somehow more dehumanizing for all it specifies he should be brought in alive.

Zoro is aggressively ignoring that one, and Nami can’t help but agree with him as she skims the information – not once is Zoro referred to by name, only by serial number and the arena nickname at the top of the poster, and the holoboard itself is actually a collection of ads about “lost property.”

Usopp and Sanji look like they’ve also picked up on this, and Nami takes a moment to consider the irony of the protective looks they’re sporting, considering Zoro’s own protective streak and the fact that, after Luffy, he’s definitely the one most capable of taking care of himself.

“Hey Usopp,” Nami says conversationally, slinging an arm around him and enjoying the way he tenses up a little at the next phrase, “do me a favor?”

“O-of course, Nami! Wait, what sort of favor?”

Smart boy. She grins at him and points at the offending holoboard. “Can you shoot that for me? I don’t think my staff has enough force to actually damage it, but they’ve all got that-“

“-little weakness in the upper left, so that stuff can get uploaded to them by the public, yeah, I can do that.” Usopp grins back at her, seeing where she’s going with this, and pulls out and honest to goodness slingshot and picks a rock up off the ground.

“… you’re kidding, right?” She demands, looking at the Stone Age technology in their gunner’s hands. “You’ve got a gun, right?”

“Yeah, but this’ll be more effective. Plus, it’s a rock I found right here, so it’d be harder to pin it on us.”

Nami does have to concede that point, and also frankly the lot of them should probably not be standing in front of a board full of wanted posters when two of them have faces that match those posters – someone’s gonna notice.

They haven’t managed to draw attention, yet, but when Usopp’s shot nails the upload port at exactly the right angle and the whole thing sputters and sends up sparks and dies heads start to turn. Nami grins, satisfied, and slides her arm through Zoro’s, dragging him off towards the markets.

“C’mon, let’s go get the supplies we need. I haven’t got a map for Between, and we don’t wanna miss the Grand Line and be lost in space forever.”

Sanji shudders, and nabs Usopp and Luffy – the former to actually help carry food supplies, the later to keep an eye on, since Luffy’s managed to find trouble everywhere they’ve stopped so far and Loguetown is big enough to provide a different class of trouble.

“By the way, Zoro, you owe me a so many credits for that.” Nami informs the swordsman, and ignores his indignant sputtering about how it was Usopp who did the actual work.

Life as a free agent is pretty damn good.

* * *

 

Usopp and Nami compare notes, while she does a fucking masterful job of piloting them out of Logue’s gravitational pull and out towards the black of Between. Those are her words, but Usopp is inclined to agree, since frankly there’s an astonishing amount of math that went into it and he doesn’t understand half the information on the screens. He can navigate fine in-atmo, and got a crash course from Sanji in how to fly between planets in a system when they were busy chasing after Nami, but Between is a whole other story and frankly it’s terrifying that they might miss the system by actual light years and never be seen or heard from again as they slowly starve in the black. Usopp doesn’t blame Sanji for his nerves _at all_.

Loguetown was, all told, not as much of a disaster as it could have been. Sure, they’d all nearly gotten caught by the Marines, but they hadn’t, and Luffy had nearly died, except it turns out that his weird mod meant he didn’t actually conduct electricity and so he was fine. Zoro had acquired a couple of new swords to replace the ones he’d busted back on Cocoyashi – although Nami’s explanation of how that had happened was equal parts baffling and horrifying.

Seriously, who just throws swords in the air and bets their fucking arm on the outcome? His chest still isn’t healed, for goodness’s sake!

Nami tells him about the Marine lady who’d accused Zoro of stealing the white sword he guards as jealously as a mother dragon (Usopp’s kind of surprised she didn’t accuse Zoro of stealing _himself_ since that was the general narrative of what happened when gladiators, uh, left their arenas alive), Zoro’s wigged out reaction to her, and the subsequent fight she’d had to get them out of for fear of the idiot ripping his stitches again.

The swords were given as a gift, it turns out, but she still insists he owes her for ‘emotional damages’ and while Usopp is kind of suspicious of this he’s learned by now that arguing with Nami about money is definitely always a losing argument so he just tells her about his end of the adventure.

Nami is, well, Nami, and about as much of a coward as Usopp is, at least when money isn’t involved, so Usopp doesn’t embellish that much and freely admits that he and Sanji lost track of Luffy while distracted by some fish that Sanji was impressed about finding, eventually finding him by following the sounds of chaos. They had not managed to avoid a fight, but Luffy had managed to keep the scary marine captain off of their tails long enough for everyone to regroup, and then that convenient windstorm had kicked up so that they could get off-planet.

He did some sniffing while they were in the market, and Usopp is _pretty_ sure that Captain Smoker won’t come after them, seeing as he’s supposedly permanently assigned to Loguetown and seems pretty fucking possessive of the city in the first place. Smoker is a genmod, like Luffy, only and definitely at least as crazy as their captain is because his weapon has kairoseki embedded in it. The stuff only doesn’t affect humans, for some reason, but everything else alive in the galaxy seems to have some issues with it – and it makes most human genmods incredibly weak for the duration of contact. To be a genmod and carry it around voluntarily feels, to Usopp, like a special kind of idiocy, but it seems to be working for Smoker.

Nami hums, pushes some last few buttons, and nods with satisfaction. She pushes the button for the intercom.

“Settle in, boys,” she says, “We’ve got a couple of days of Between before we get to the Grand Line, so hopefully one of you managed to buy a pack of cards or something while we were dirtside.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want you all to know how hard it was to avoid the "Restaurant at the End of the Universe" joke when writing about the Baratie. Appreciate my restraint - it certainly hasn't managed to show up anywhere else in this story.
> 
> Also, general announcement that the Zoro/Sanji is (eventually) serious but also deeply platonic, because you can pry ace!Zoro from my cold, dead hands. Sanji's gonna need to talk that out with Zoro eventually, but that's another fic.


	2. Really Big.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Straw Hat Pirates enter the Grand Line, liberate several countries mostly by accident, and meet some new crew members!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nami/Vivi is definitely there if you squint. (I strongly encourage squinting.)
> 
> Next chapter is hopefully coming to you in the next week, unless I am eaten by schoolwork. Enjoy! :)

_**REALLY BIG.** _

 

No one had managed to buy a pack of cards, which turns out to be fine, because Luffy definitely isn’t the sort of person who can sit still long enough to even play ‘go-fish’ and they all end up taking turns occupying their captain as a form of dealing with their own boredom. A bored Luffy, everyone quickly realizes, is a terrible thing.

They settle into something approaching domesticity – well, as domestic as it gets with Sanji and Zoro constantly picking fights with each other, and the violent consequences of Luffy and Usopp’s decision to prank Nami by adding blue food coloring to her shampoo. (Also the violet consequences, but fortunately for everyone those washed out and Nami’s hair was back to its usual orange two days later.)

Naturally, it’s right as everyone is getting comfortable when the giant fucking whale appears on the screen during Usopp’s watch.

Later, everyone will dutifully agree that Usopp did not scream like a little girl upon noticing the whale, although Luffy requires a gentle kick in the ankles to get on board and Sanji definitely spends a week snickering to himself whenever he remembers.

In any case, there is a whale, and – since Luffy is Luffy – the whale is soon their friend.

Nami gets a map out of it, and some advice about the slightly warped physics of the Grand Line from the old man who lives in the whale (no, really) which is the only reason she’s not pissed about the fact that their illustrious start to adventuring in the Grand Line was to get eaten by a space whale. Usopp, in the notebook where he’s started keeping a log of their adventures, makes an executive decision to leave out the part where they got eaten, and also to make the incident at the next moon they stop at slightly less embarrassing for all involved.

The important points get covered, anyway: there was food, and a fight (several fights), and eventually they picked up a princess and set off to bring her back to her home planet in exchange for half the treasure in the country – Nami claims this is a generous offer on her part, since they’re the only viable transport option for the princess in question and she could very easily have asked for all the treasure in the country.

Vivi, the princess, is very sweet outside of her deep cover in an interstellar assassination network, and she and her space duck fit right into the crew in short order.

 

* * *

 

Miss All Sunday doesn’t get paid enough for this shit, she reflects as she reveals her presence on the recreational deck of the Merry. It is a very small ship, and this is easily the largest space in it, and most of the occupants are present (she’s pretty sure there’s at least one more, according to the reports from Whiskey Peak, but honestly it’s not that important. Four people and a duck are on this deck, and it’s taken a lot of effort to sneak into a ship this tiny and make a dramatic but understated reveal and no one looks impressed. Honestly.

She smiles mysteriously at the tiny crew, enjoying the moment as the princess yells angrily for a moment before explaining who Miss All Sunday is to her new friends. It’s a little rude, as assessments of her character go, but being fair she _is_ currently very high up on the ladder of the interstellar assassination network, and none of these people know that she’s got her own reasons for doing that that have very little to do with the ‘assassination’ bit.

Baroque Works has a shit dental plan, and she’d be happy to leave it behind if not for the other advantages it provides.

These people still don’t look nearly impressed enough, so she sprouts a copy of her arm out of their captain’s shoulder (really? The redhead and the green-haired guy with the swords look reasonably competent, they’re following this child?) and steals his hat, flicking it towards herself.

“Hey!” He yells at her, smile falling off his face for the first time since she revealed herself, “That’s my hat!”

She doesn’t actually get a chance to settle it on her own head, because he stretches out his arm and manages to snatch it back before she catches it.

Interesting power for a genmod, that. Doesn’t seem too useful, but you never know – a lot of genmods with apparently useless abilities can be incredibly dangerous if they’re clever enough to figure out how to use them effectively.

His smile returns once the hat is safely back on his head. “Hahhhh, hat. Oh, that was neat, though! How’d you do that?”

Miss All Sunday lets her smirk widen and sprouts a few copies of her arm in a showy pattern from her own elbow. “Humans are so… limited, don’t you think?”

This doesn’t seem to alarm the captain, who ‘ooohs’ appreciatively and practically sparkles as he looks at something that unnerves most people. “That’s so cool! You should join my crew!”

Actually, none of them look very alarmed. This is starting to be a bit distressing, usually she gets a more… drastic reaction than that.

“That’s probably handy for piloting.” The redhead comments, and then looks horrified at herself, “I mean, I’m sorry, that wasn’t supposed to be a pun!”

They’re getting away from the point. Miss All Sunday is here to intimidate them, provide a map, and get the hell ou- er, mysteriously vanish, adding to her intimidation points when they can’t detect her shuttle or figure out how she got on their ship in the first place.

“You’re heading for Alabasta, aren’t you? So noble, to return their princess to them – I happen to have this chart to one of its adjacent moons, if you’d be interested in such a thing. The Grand Line can be difficult to navigate for the unexperienced, and it wouldn’t do for her to be late.”

She dangles the data chip on its frankly tacky bead string in front of them, and watches the redhead’s eyes light up – definitely the navigator, then. The interest in the captain’s eyes, which had been so evident in the face of her earlier display, dies more or less immediately, however.

“Nah,” he says, looking abruptly extremely bored.

The navigator hits him, hard enough to knock his head forward further than would be natural for anyone else Miss All Sunday knows. “What do you mean, ‘nah’? Luffy, she’s right, the Grand Line is really unpredictable, even for someone who understands physics as well as I do – a chart would save us a lot of time and risk!”

“Yeah, but it wouldn’t be as fun.” The captain whines, rubbing the back of his head where he’d been hit and looking like a little kid being scolded for having his hand in the cookie jar. “Besides, she’s not on our side! Why should we trust her?”

“You were literally just telling her she should join the crew,” the swordsman points out from his corner.

The princess just looks back and forth between them all, evidentially not yet used to the crew’s behavior yet. Miss All Sunday can sympathize, this has been a singular experience all around.

“Yeah, but I don’t want her help.” Luffy says, and that appears to be that for the swordsman, who shrugs and goes back to his weightlifting.

“Luff- oh, forget it, why on earth would you start listening to reason now.” The redhead throws up her hands and leaves the room.

Luffy grins at Miss All Sunday, “So yeah! Thanks, cool hands lady, but we’re good! Do you wanna stay for lunch?”

She blinks at him, feeling very unbalanced, and reminds herself very firmly that s _he_ is the one who is supposed to be throwing people off balance.

She tosses the chip to the navigator, sprouts a hand from the girl’s own arm to catch and hand it to her when she doesn’t react fast enough, and pastes on her most mysterious smile as firmly as she can.

“I’m afraid I have prior engagements. Keep the chart, in case you want it.” She leaves by the door, not really having any more dramatic options, but making sure to close it behind her with a spare arm even though so far that hasn’t been working to creep any of them out.

She also leaves behind an eye, in an out of the way part of the wall, where it won’t be noticed, so that she can keep watch on them until she gets out of the range in which she can sustain it. She gets into her cloaked shuttle, programs her next destination in, and looks up from that task in time to see the swordsman looking her dead in the eye she’d left in the wall. He grins, points at his own eye, and then at hers, before waving mockingly.

She lets the eye fade out of existence as she takes off, and refuses to take a moment to reflect on how very strange this whole incident had been.

 

* * *

 

Nami catches some sort of mystery space disease while they’re having adventures, which at first Luffy doesn’t really worry about it – he’s never been sick, and he’s sure it’ll all blow over pretty soon. But Vivi says her fever’s too high, looking panicked, and Sanji and Usopp between them can only just about manage to get out of atmo and to a nearby planet, and according to the chart that the mystery lady with the cool arms had left them, there’s a planet fairly well known for the skill of their doctors nearby. It’s not like it’s a hard choice, even as they all look at him to make the final decision on where they’re going.

Obviously, it’s got to be to Drum.

Nami’s mystery space disease keeps getting worse, and by the time they land in the main settlement on Drum she’s completely out of it and looks much paler than normal. Drum is beautiful, covered in snow and sparsely dotted with trees – ordinarily Luffy would be dying to explore it, but there are more important things right now, like getting Nami to a doctor.

This turns out to be needlessly complicated, since the former king of Drum was a total jerk and took all the doctors for himself when he left the planet. There’s only one left, a scary old lady according to the locals, who lives far outside of town. Also, there’s a snowstorm coming that’s going to make flying there impossible, even with Usopp’s “mad in-atmo flying skills.”

The solution is obvious to Luffy, who prefers the direct route whenever possible. So Vivi bundles Nami up as well as she can, and they strap her to his back as firmly as they can. He sets out for the mountain the doctor-lady lives on with Sanji as escort, since he’s on strict orders not to punch anything (thereby disturbing Nami more than necessary or, apparently, safe). This leaves Zoro to protect the ship, Usopp, and Vivi (and her space duck). It also leaves Usopp and Vivi the unenviable task of keeping Zoro from doing anything stupid (Sanji’s words).

(They, of course, don’t succeed, but it’s not like Luffy disagrees with his first mate’s choices.)

The trek to the mountain is stressful, interrupted with the local wildlife and then they set off an avalanche and then suddenly he’s climbing a mountain with a mostly-unconscious Sanji and a completely unconscious Nami on his back and honestly it’s still not the worst mountain-climbing experience Luffy’s ever had in his life.

It’s definitely the most stressful, though, and he’s relieved when they reach the top and a small, fuzzy figure appears out of the castle door.

“Oh good,” he tells it, as he falls over, using the last of his energy to make sure he ends up on the bottom and doesn’t jostle his friends too much on the way down, “they need a doctor.”

 

* * *

 

Chopper has always been fascinated by humans. They’d invaded before he was born, but he’d spent his first few cycles being taught to avoid them if at all possible – humans are vicious creatures, his herd said, they’ll shoot and eat you as soon as look at you.

But he’d never gotten along well with his own kind, rejected for his strange interests and unnatural coloring, and he was soon sneaking away to watch their ships land and take off. Unfortunately, his herd was right about humans in many ways, and this behavior had gotten him shot – but another human had seen it happen, and yelled at the human who’d shot him, and then taken him back to his own home to make him well again.

That strange human had started leaking from his eyes when Chopper had told him about his herd, and then given Chopper a name pronounceable by humans and declared him to be his new apprentice.

Chopper still isn’t all that trusting of humans, outside of a select few, but this new one’s relief and self-sacrifice reminds him of his first human friend.

 _They need a doctor,_ he’d said, completely discounting himself, even though he clearly also needed a doctor. He hadn’t freaked out at Chopper’s appearance, either.

Kureha rolls her eyes at him as he fusses over their three patients more than is strictly necessary, but she’s got that soft expression on that says she approves, so he doesn’t worry about it too much.

The blond man wakes up first, introduces himself and his friends, thanks them extensively for taking care of his crew, and enquires after Chopper’s nutritional requirements (more sugar than is advisable for humans) and Kureha’s allergies (none) and preferences (plums) before politely but firmly taking over their kitchen.

The result is delicious, so neither Chopper nor Kureha can really complain, but they do – at length – once Chopper points out that Sanji really shouldn’t be doing so much soon so soon after waking up from extensive frostbite and multiple serious lacerations from Lapahns. They finally manage to get the chef to rest once Chopper shifts into his larger form and literally picks him up, putting him down in the same bed as his captain – which is slightly larger than the one Nami is sleeping in, and besides she’s definitely still too sick to have anyone else in such close proximity – with orders to keep Luffy from pulling any stitches.

Fortunately, this works, and Sanji eventually falls back asleep, back against the headboard and hand gently resting on Luffy’s shoulder, leaving Chopper free to check on Nami again and mix more medicine.

By the time the other humans have had their turn waking up, Chopper is almost getting used to being accepted in stride. No one’s called him a monster.

It’s a really nice change, if he’s being honest.

 

* * *

 

“Everyone, this is Chopper! He’s gonna join the crew!” Luffy declares proudly, and is met with resigned looks from the rest of his crew. That’s not right, they should be way more excited about their cool new crew member! He’s an alien! And super cool! And he can shapeshift!

“Did you ask him that, dumbass?” Sanji asks, raising his curly eyebrow at Luffy.

“Of course I-“ Wait a second, had he asked? Luffy turns to look at Chopper, prepared to ask properly, only to be met with a sniffling, upset looking small fuzzy creature. “Chopper, what’s wrong?”

“N-no one’s ever wanted me to join something before! Don’t you think I’m a monster?”

Luffy frowns at him. “Who cares about that? Do you wanna join the crew or not? That’s the only thing that matters!”

“Y-yesss!” Chopper manages, looking incredibly tearful for a creature that didn’t seem to actually have tear ducts, as such.

“Great!” Luffy grins at him, “Let’s go!”

His navigator is better, the jerk king who’d been so mean to everyone is thoroughly beat up, and they’ve got an awesome new crew member! Who can shapeshift!

 

* * *

 

“Wait, Chopper, you’re a doctor? That’s so cool!” Luffy’s enthusiasm is endearing, Vivi thinks, even though he’s definitely an idiot. Chopper’s been with the crew for a week now, and saved Nami, Sanji, and Luffy himself. Luffy was so determined to get him on the crew – how the hell did he not know that Chopper was a doctor?

Shaking her head at the antics of everyone in the recreational area of the Merry, she stands up from the comfy – if slightly ridiculous for being indoors – deck chair she’s been reading in and stretches. Breathing in, she catches the sweet scent of the orange bushes Nami’s so protective of, which grow under artificial UV lights and are scrupulously watered and fertilized. They’re blossoming at the moment, and the redhead is serenely engaged in pollinating them with a tiny, fluffy paintbrush. Luffy had been curious about the process, but ultimately he’d gotten in the way and she’d shoved him out of the way hard enough that Chopper had come over to fuss, prompting his revelation.

Fortunately, Luffy’s pretty much immune to blunt force trauma, Vivi considers absently as she gathers up the glasses which had, until recently, been full of delicious handmade parfaits in order to return them to the kitchen and Sanji. Maybe he’d even actually let her help wash them, this time!

Usopp’s already in the kitchen when she gets there, using the large table that takes up most of the space which isn’t Strictly Sanji’s Territory to sort out an alarming number of gears and wires, along with several lengths of pipe. A pot of sky blue paint sits incongruously in the corner, apparently for whenever he’s finished with whatever he’s working on, and Vivi is reminded that Merry’s handsome paint job of the Strawhat’s insignia was Usopp’s handiwork.

She exchanges greetings with both of them, hands over the glasses, and is not permitted to wash them but – after some persuasion – is handed a towel with a not-insignificant amount of fluttering so that she can help him dry.

Usopp leaves at some point, his mess mostly still on the table, muttering something about double-checking Nami’s measurements. Vivi’s pretty sure the measurements in question aren’t the kind that would get him punched.

She winds up staying and chatting with Sanji while the blond prepares dinner. The whole kitchen smells like basil and garlic, and while Sanji insists she doesn’t need to be doing anything it’s still nice to keep him company.

Apparently, in the half-hour or so that Usopp is gone, they miss all the excitement.

 

* * *

 

Usopp is pretty focused on the puzzle of the wiring he’s working out in his head as he heads through the door to the recreational deck with several lengths of piping and a measuring tape tangled together in his arms. Nami had asked for a weapon more impressive than the staff she currently carries, back during the Incident at Whiskey Peak, as he’s been calling it in his journal. Not that she can’t deal some serious damage to people’s skulls the length of steel that she’s got, but the Grand Line is a whole new level of weird. East was known for being a pretty thoroughly colonized cluster and didn’t have many modified humans to speak of, much less other aliens, but a simple staff just doesn’t measure up here.

Nami’s one true love is, of course, the kind of astrophysics and math that makes Usopp’s head hurt and allows them to navigate the stars successfully, but she makes a hobby of weather patterns, and he’s been trying to rig something up that she can use to cause some serious damage.

“Ahaha, that’s so cool~!” Luffy is saying as Usopp enters. Well, one Luffy is saying, since there are somehow two of him. Usopp’s pretty sure it’s his Luffy though, since Luffy – for all his oddities – isn’t really in the habit of wearing bright pink coats or swan-head shaped shoes. The second Luffy makes exactly the same excited face back at him, and it’s honestly pretty cool.

Nami, over by her precious orange bushes, looks less amused. Possibly this is because whatever is impersonating Luffy managed to get on their ship in the middle of space without anyone noticing (this is the second time, actually, now that he’s thinking of it, and seriously what the fuck is wrong with the Grand Line that this is a recurring thing? Are there special shields you can install to mitigate that?). Possibly because two Luffys is definitely a recipe for disaster.

Luffy-the-captain notices Usopp’s entrance right around then, and immediately stretches out his arm to grab Usopp’s wrist and drag him over. “Usopp! This is our new friend Bon-chan! Hey, hey, Bon-chan, can you do Usopp next?”

Usopp watches, fascinated and a little scared, as the second Luffy’s grinning face blurs a little bit and kind of… swirls itself around, until he’s looking at a stranger, who’s also grinning.

The whole incident turns out to be actually kind of fun, and everyone enjoys Bon-chan’s company and the obvious amusement he has at rearranging and combining the crews faces with each other’s. Well, Usopp, Luffy, and Chopper enjoy it. Zoro mostly looks stoic and ignores their antics, and Nami looks vaguely nauseous every time something on Bon-chan’s face changes. U

 Bon-chan claims to be a human genmod with the ability to temporarily duplicate key genetic sequences of people he’s touched, letting him copy their features.

According to a horrified Vivi, after Bon-chan’s ship has hailed them, picked him up, and sailed off in another direction, this is true, and also he works for Baroque Works, the interstellar assassination network that the crew is sort of setting themselves up as the enemies of by helping Vivi out. Sanji immediately starts fighting with Zoro about failing to spot a threat, and Nami looks like she’s contemplating clocking the both of them if it’ll get her some peace and quiet.

Naturally, this is when the autopilot beeps to let them know that they’re entering orbit around their destination: Alabasta, Vivi’s home moon.

Usopp feels a bit ill. It must be his _can’t land on this moon_ disorder acting up. Maybe Chopper has something for that.

 

* * *

 

Alabasta is another dead end, but at least it’s a dead end with delicious rice dishes, Ace reflects as he chews industriously. He feels like he’s always hungry these days, even more so than he did before he first set off to space. Of course, he’s probably also metaphorically hungry at the moment – this “chasing down a mutinous, murdering coward” business is fucking thankless work and the Galaxy is very, very big. Teach always seems to skip out of somewhere just as he gets new info.

He probably falls asleep or something, because the next thing he’s aware of is the concerned chef making a series of panicked sputtering noises as he tries to divide his attention between a customer who may have just died (Ace isn’t sure why he gives off that vibe so much, he knows he snores, but the chef is giving him a very familiar look) and a customer who is somehow eating even more than Ace.

There’s not many people who can do that, but it’s still a shock to turn and come face to face with his baby brother, years and lightyears both from the last time they’d seen each other.

“Luffy!” Ace shouts happily.

“Ace!” Luffy shouts back, familiar grin plastered all over his face, only his mouth is full and it comes out more like a garbled “aysh!” This doesn’t really impede understanding, since Ace did grow up with Luffy and has had a lot of practice deciphering what he sounds like while stuffing his face. “I haben’t sheen you in yeabsh!”

They hug, and the other patrons ‘awwww’ at the touching family reunion.

This is, of course, when the Marines bust the door down.

 

* * *

 

Vivi’s finally home, and as nice as it is to be breathing proper desert air again, she’s not having such a great time.

It’s been two days since they made it to Alabasta, and unfortunately the giant clusterfuck that is the current uh, political situation has only gotten more tangled in her absence, because now everyone’s declaring her father’s dynasty unstable since his only heir is missing.

That’s bullshit, first of all – she has at least three second-cousins who would do OK at ruling the place in a pinch, but Crocodile’s propaganda has wedged itself in pretty deep, and on top of that the whole place is crawling with assassins, most of whom are gunning for her as the last piece to be eliminated before the organization can take over the desert moon.

The gas giant that Alabasta orbits is setting, and it’s starting to get unpleasantly cold for everyone who isn’t Chopper (although no one is particularly jealous, since Chopper’s covered in fur and struggling to make it through the heat of the day here – Zoro’d been carrying him for several miles), and they’ve stopped to make camp. Chopper, in his largest form, is providing some extra warmth for the humans while checking to make sure the uh, extended exercise today hadn’t interfered with the healing of the small scratches that remained of the Lapahn wounds on Sanji’s arms. The extended exercise came from fighting and then running from assassins, marines, bounty hunters, a restauranteur after Luffy ran into _another_ marine who’d apparently chased them out of East, and Luffy’s brother before he got distracted by something else (although they weren’t really running away from Ace, who’d seemed nice in their brief meeting, and he had kept Captain Smoker off their tails), and-

OK you know what? Basically the whole town had chased them. And now they were camping out in the desert, trying to make a plan for getting to the capitol without the Merry, which would definitely attract too much attention since the capitol’s space port was locked down for festivities. Currently, the sum total of their resources was:

  * a camel that Nami had befriended before they’d had to, um, leave town with all possible speed;
  * the pot of stew that Sanji was fussing over, which consisted mostly of the giant desert scorpion they’d been attacked by earlier;
  * all the junk in Usopp’s bag, the medical supplies in Chopper’s backpack, and the food that Sanji had managed to buy before skipping town, divided between him and Zoro;
  * Zoro’s swords, Nami’s shiny new staff (courtesy of Usopp), Vivi’s own weapons;
  * And their wits, which were – in terms of planning skills – certainly unevenly distributed.



Vivi has gotten to know and love this crew of maniacs over the past few weeks, and she cares for them a lot, but she’s just a tad more concerned with the fate of her country at the moment. Mostly because Alabasta’s fate is hanging in the balance and honestly her lovable maniacs is led by a man who tends to leap first and look never.

“Look, Mr. 0 is up to no good, we just don’t know exactly what kind of no good, right?” Usopp is saying, ignoring Luffy’s revelation about Chopper’s not-at-all-a-secret doctor skills. “And Vivi, you said he was working out of a casino… so if some of us who aren’t on wanted posters dressed up and snuck in, we could poke around and find out what his plan is!”

Nami pats Vivi on the arm comfortingly. “It’s gonna be okay, Vivi, we’ll come up with a better plan than that.”

 

* * *

 

They do not come up with a better plan. In fact, the original plan is working out ok, until Luffy gets bored and then suddenly they’re all in a cage with the marine who’d chased them out of East, listening to a warlord explain his plans for taking over a moon and building paradise.

He’s completely unhinged, Nami thinks in despair, and shares an incredulous look with Captain Smoker as Mr. 0 – as Crocodile - honest-to-goodness begins to go on a supervillain rant about how most of the population would, of course, need to die for him to achieve this paradise. Smoker looks as horrified as the rest of them, and also like he wants to punch Crocodile very badly, although even with his creepy dissolving-into-smoke powers he can’t do shit about it either, since the cage they’re in is made of kairoseki. Nami feels that.

Oh fuck, she’s sympathizing with a marine. This is bad.

“HEY! I’M GONNA KICK YOUR ASS, YOU’RE MAKING VIVI SAD!” yells Luffy, because of course he does. There’s no stopping Luffy, and he’s got one solution to every problem (to give him some credit where it’s due: this solution has, so far, worked out pretty well for him). Of course, he then ruins this boast by touching the kairoseki walls of the cage _again_ and immediately falling over.

Then Miss All Sunday walks in, towing Vivi behind her, and it all gets worse before it gets better.

The communicator on Crocodile’s desk rings, and Sanji’s on the other end claiming to be ‘Mr. Prince’ and while Crocodile is distracted with that (and while Usopp and Nami manage to cover Luffy’s mouth well enough that he doesn’t give the game away), Vivi gets free of Miss All Sunday – weird, given the woman’s abilities - grabs a key, and they all book it out of there.

Nami turns to look back as the aquarium holding all the bananadiles bursts, and sees Miss All Sunday toss her a wink before escaping down a different tunnel. Huh. How about that.

She’s distracted from wondering about Miss All Sunday’s motives by yelling at Zoro for rescuing Smoker, which is definitely going to cause them problems later, and then yelling at Luffy for telling Zoro to do it, and then Smoker’s lieutenant lady, who makes Zoro look all fight-no-wait-definitely-flight and go unhealthily pale, shows up and also starts yelling and once again, it gets worse before it gets better.

A lot worse.

 

* * *

 

Luffy loses.

 

* * *

 

That’s about as bad as it can get, honestly. Luffy fights Crocodile, and he loses. Vivi tries to stop the rebels, and no one listens. They’re once again stuck out in the desert, and this time they’re definitely going up for a fight they’ve got no chance in hell of winning.

On the other hand, they have a better plan this time.

It, of course, also goes to shit, but there’s only so much you can hope for.

 

* * *

 

Miss All Su- fuck it, clearly that’s a name she’s not going to need anymore. Might as well be honest in this last stretch of life.

Robin is disappointed. She’s spent years working for Crocodile, running his errands and fulfilling his plans and laying her own in exchange for a chance at finally finding the lost history and all she’s got are plans for a huge weapon she has no interest in, a nasty stab wound, and a roof about to collapse on her head.

The prone body of the Strawhat captain groans and levers itself into an upright position. Frankly, Robin is surprised he’s still alive. More surprisingly, he’s apparently in decent enough shape that he can get himself to his feet and scoop up the unconscious king of Alabasta.

He steps over Crocodile, still dripping blood like he had to beat the man in the first place, and stops in front of Robin.

“Hey lady,” he says, his voice like sandpaper, “do you wanna join my crew?”

She laughs in his face. How could he possibly want her in his crew? Her mother married a space horror, according to her aunt (she’s never met her other parent), and as the result she’s inhuman, disgusting, and hasn’t been allowed to forget it since she was a child. Her life’s work is apparently unachievable, and she… she doesn’t know what to do, is unsure of her next step for the first time in years.

“Why?” She asks him, and he grins at her.

“I think you’re cool, and nice, and you can read those squiggles – you said they were your dream, right? I’m sure we can find other squiggles, out there, so you should come with us! I’m gonna be Pirate King, and we’ve gotta go a lot of places to do that! Nami’s gonna chart the galaxy, and Zoro’s gotta find that hawk-guy to fight again, and-“

He scoops her up without asking and she hits him in the side with all the force she can put into her elbow. “Put me down! I haven’t got anything to live for! I’m a monster!”

He ignores her, gets them out of the underground temple, and sets her down gently before gracelessly falling over.

“Nah, you’re not.” He says confidently, grinning at her, and then he passes out.

Just what is she supposed to do with that?

 

* * *

 

Vivi is going to be sorry to see them go. Her crew has saved her, and her country, and are letting the marines take the credit publically (off-world, anyway – over her dead body will anyone in Alabasta not know the truth!) as they sneak back through the desert to the Merry. She goes with them, her last breath of freedom before she goes back to her place as Heir to the Throne. They have a bonfire, this time, out in the desert, because Luffy insists it’s best to celebrate their victory since he’s finished being unconscious (it had been a stressful three days for the rest of them, although they’d all been beaten up nearly as badly). Chopper frets over Zoro’s risk of popping his stitches and the huge bruises on Sanji’s shins, Nami drinks everyone under the table, and Usopp tells a for-once unembellished version of the fight he and Chopper had gone through.

Her moon is safe, no more bombs in bell towers or maniacal would-be despots, and it’s a bittersweet blessing, marred by loss, but it’s a blessing nonetheless.

She accepts Nami’s hand, and they dance into the night, worries momentarily forgotten in favor of remembering the sweet taste of victory.

 

* * *

 

“Sir!” says Tashigi, saluting and doing that annoying thing she does where she waits for permission to enter his office – or, well, the space he has commandeered as an office in the chaos of a mostly-flattened Alubarna. He’s told her a thousand times he doesn’t care, but she insists protocol must be followed.

“I’ve told you a thousand times, Tashigi, you can just come in.” Smoker says, and is given the disappointed look she reserves for when he breaches protocol in ways she disapproves of – i.e. anything that doesn’t directly help them catch pirates. He rolls his eyes, but waves her in and asks, “What’s wrong?”

“It’s, um, HQ sir. They’re on the comms, and want to, er, discuss recent events at Alabasta.”

That’s not particularly surprising, although he supposes it is fairly inconvenient. Smoker puffs at his cigars – the one advantage of being dirtside is that he can use real ones; even though he’s perfectly capable of using his abilities to smoke safely on ships it tends to worry everyone else on board – and considers the options.

“They pissed we left East? Cuz if so, tough shit, we had a solid reason.”

“No, sir, they-“

“Actually, Captain, they’re rather grateful you were here.” Tashigi is interrupted by an imposing woman with pink hair, and scrambles quickly to get out of her way.

Smoker shoots his Master Chief Petty Officer a glare – really, shouldn’t “Black-Cage” Hina’s presence have been the higher priority message?

“Oh?” He asks, and immediately regrets it, because the smile Hina sends him spells very bad things for his future.

“Yes,” she says, “It looks bad when pirates are the ones to save an entire moon from a warlord who’s under contract with the Government of United Worlds. I suspect HQ is calling to offer you a promotion. In the meantime, here is the official story.”

A depressingly thick file lands on the desk. The desk, being made out of a door rescued from the rubble stacked on top of mostly-intact bricks, collapses. Hina gives him a look that clearly conveys her opinion of someone like him getting the credit for taking care of this whole mess (hell, he agrees with her), and stalks out of the room.

Tashigi starts gathering up the papers. Smoker ignores her protests and starts to help. They’re nearly done when the paper detailing the promotions catches his eye.

“Well Tashigi,” he says, chewing on his cigars and considering the options provided by gaining the rank of Commodore – namely, getting to go wherever he damn well pleased in pursuit of justice without prior approval. “’Ensign’ is certainly less of a mouthful than ‘Master Chief Petty Officer.’ Congratulations.”

 

* * *

 

“Everyone, this is Nico Robin!” Luffy says, grin a mile wide, “She’s joining our crew! She says it’s because I saved her after she didn’t have anything else to live for but that’s not true, so she’s gonna come adventuring with us!”

Zoro looks at the former Miss All Sunday. The former Miss All Sunday smiles at the rest of them. It doesn’t really look genuine, for all that it’s practiced and well at home on her face.

He resolves not to trust her, and doubles this resolution as he watches the stupid dart-brow immediately fall head-over heels for the newest lady member of the crew, and Usopp and Chopper be just as charmed as Luffy by her sprouting arms from either side of Luffy’s head in an imitation of Chopper’s horns.

Nami, who Zoro can usually count on to be his partner in deeper suspicion than everyone else, is won over upon the reveal that Robin knew where a bunch of Crocodile’s treasure had been stashed, and grabbed a bunch of it on her way out of town after the battle.

Zoro’s not going to trust her so easily. She’s got to earn it.

She glances his way from where she’s talking about navigation with Nami, who seems overjoyed to have someone other than Sanji and Usopp who understands even a third of what she’s talking about when she starts into the physics talk, and raises an eyebrow at him. He narrows his eye at her, and repeats the ‘keeping watch on you’ gesture he’d made weeks ago, when she’d left that eye on their wall after her mysterious visit.

She just smiles back, and Zoro tries not to physically bristle at the dismissal of his threat.

“Why does she bother you so much?” Sanji asks that night, when he brings Zoro a very late dinner or very early breakfast, depending on how you look at it, and they swap watch. He’s never stopped bringing food with him, after that first night, and dutifully eats part of it within full view of Zoro before handing it over – he actually does it at group meals, too, less overtly, by serving himself and Zoro the exact same thing every time and trying a bite of every dish before starting his meal. The dartbrow is annoying and they push each other’s buttons, but he’s never cruel when it comes to this. It’s one of the very few things off-limits in their fights.

Zoro shrugs. Usually the half hour or so where he eats before dozing off for the rest of Sanji’s watch is spent in silence; the middle of the night has become a kind of unspoken truce where they don’t go for each other’s throats and can just sort of coexist for a while. But sometimes they talk, and there’s something about the late hour, the dimness of ship’s night and the glow of the monitors that makes it feel honest and real every time.

“She hasn’t earned it yet.”

“Earned what?”

“Trust.”

The cook is silent for a while, giving this its proper consideration. Then he hums in agreement – not that Zoro thinks he’s going to start doubting Robin, part of the idiot’s weird chivalrous streak seems to include taking anything a woman says as gospel, but accepting of Zoro’s reasoning.

They sit in silence for a little longer, Zoro finishing the rice balls Sanji had brought up for him. He passes the plate up for Sanji to set on the panel, and is settling in to sleep when the cook asks, quiet and curious,

“When did I earn it?”

Zoro cracks his eye open again, looks at Sanji. The blond is serious, and the swordsman supposes he’s not going to be the one to break the unwritten rule where they’re both honest in this one space.

“The second time we did this. You brought food, and didn’t make a big deal out of proving it was safe, even though you hate that I think it might not be. And then you didn’t say anything about me staying, or about not letting the others find out that you hate being alone. You trusted me enough to try and build something.”

Sanji looks kind of stricken, and something bordering on touched, which is too much emotion for Zoro to deal with at the moment, so he closes his eyes again and drifts off, leaving the cook to keep an eye on the monitors as they sail through space.

 

* * *

 

Nami picks up something strange on her screens two days into their journey towards Jaya, and Luffy is immediately beside himself with curiosity. She manages to persuade him that it’d be a good idea to resupply before gallivanting off into the unknown, so they still manage to make it to Jaya with minimal interruptions and only one shootout, during their brief detour to investigate some space wreckage.

Because it’s Luffy, the shootout ends in making a friend. Of course it does.

Jaya is supposed to be an uneventful stopover on their way to bigger things deeper into the Grand Line. It is supposed to be a little bit of rest after saving an entire moon and not getting any of the credit. Sanji takes Usopp, Chopper, and Robin to stock up on food, medical supplies, and whatever junk Usopp has decided he needs for his latest project. Nami takes Luffy and Zoro to go find out what they can about the strange readings they’d picked up, and hopefully keep the two of them out of trouble.

Naturally, that doesn’t work out. Well, they find out that there’s some hermit at the edge town who spends all his time looking out into space investigating the readings, and is convinced that there’s a mystical planet full of treasure lost somewhere in a huge nebula nearby. Jaya’s at the end of a system, and they’re going to have to go Between one way or another to get to the next System in the Grand Line, which is named for how remarkably unclustered the inhabited stars in the Cluster are.

Luffy, of course, is all for the adventure of going into the nebula, even though that’s a _terrible idea._

Anyway, she doesn’t manage to keep the two of them out of trouble, as they proceed to get into the weirdest one-sided bar fight she’s ever seen and refuse to fight back against the asshole telling them that dreams aren’t real.

Eventually, she collects her dream-defending moron of a captain and idiot first mate who’s too willing to go alone with the moron, literally dragging them out of the bar to the jeers of the assholes who’d beaten them up.

It’s honestly not that bad, she’s relieved to hear Chopper’s diagnosis when they get back to the ship and meet up with the others, because then she’s free to slap them both upside the head for being stupid.

And then Luffy decides they have to go talk to the hermit about the “mystery space cloud,” because he’s Luffy and of course he does. Nami pinches the bridge of her nose in frustration, before ushering them all back into the Merry and taking off for the other edge of town, towards the array of astronomical equipment set up in a clearing of Jaya’s jungle. This kind of bullshit happened to her a lot less frequently before she joined up with these idiots.

What a terrible day.

 

* * *

 

What a good day!

They’d gotten to a new planet, met some cool locals (and some jerks who didn’t understand fun, but you got those every so often. Luffy wasn’t too bothered.), and discovered a mystery to be explored! And the chestnut guy with all the telescopes was super cool, with his spacefaring ancestor – space had been even less well-charted in those days, even Luffy knows that, and Norland was obviously a cool guy if he’d managed to find something new!

Luffy’s pretty sure that the planet in the book is real, and even if it isn’t going into some mystery space clouds will be a cool experience! Maybe they’ll meet more giant space whales, and can tell them about Laboon, the giant space whale they met at the very start of their Grand Line adventure!

The only thing that’s ruining it is the fact that the jerks from earlier destroyed the chestnut guy’s equipment, while they’d all been busy modifying Merry to make it safely through the initial radiator blasts or whatever to get through the space clouds and find their adventure. Luffy’s pretty pissed about that actually.

Chestnut guy has been so nice, and those guys laughed in his face and broke his stuff! Plus, Robin had been just a tiny bit excited about that old book the chestnut guy had, and it’s the first time Luffy’s seen her express interest in anything one way or another since joining the crew.

So it’s settled, then.

“Hey guys, you finish making Merry ready! I gotta go kick that jerk’s ass real quick!”

He doesn’t wait for a response, instead running off along the jungle path.

 

* * *

 

Luffy shows up again just in time for takeoff, and Usopp doesn’t bother to hide his relief.

“C’mon, Luffy, we gotta go at just the right time or Jaya’s gonna be too far in its orbit for us to get there!”

Luffy just laughs, and stretches out his arms to make it into the airlock as Nami starts up the engines. Usopp and Sanji get the airlock, well, locked, and then they’re taking off.

It’s the weirdest space flight Usopp’s ever experienced, and he considers himself reasonably experienced in such things, given Nami’s fondness for complicated maneuvers. The artificial gravity refuses to kick in even after they leave atmo, so all of them float around (Zoro looks like an offended cat at the fact that his balance is pretty shot in zero-G, which is _hilarious_ ) and end up eating a dinner of solid foods and no sauces as Sanji admits defeat on at least one front after soaking Chopper’s fur with vegetable stock by mistake.

Fortunately, the combination of no gravity and adventure serve to keep Luffy occupied, which is usually a concern within a few hours of starting a jump between planets, much less between systems. The captain is staring at the monitor that provides a visual of the space in front of them, looking rapt as the glowing space dust flies by at incredible speeds.

“Hey guys! Look, I think there’s something solid over there!”

Usopp looks over, and grudgingly agrees that there definitely seems to be some kind of glittery force field coming onto the monitor.

“Oooh, they’re hailing us! Let’s go!”

He can feel himself coming down with a bad case of _can’t go into the unknown_ syndrome. Maybe he should go take a little nap.


	3. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Skypeians, the Marines of G8, and everyone on Water7 all deal with the consequences of the Straw Hat Pirates more or less stumbling blindly upon them, and everyone continues to quietly speculate on everyone else's trauma without directly bringing it up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for lateness, got eaten by schoolwork (compilers are hard guys). I'm on a break now, though, so we can all be cautiously optimistic about the next chapter's relative timeliness! 
> 
> Anyway, enjoy! :)

_**YOU JUST WON'T BELIEVE HOW VASTLY, HUGELY, MIND-BOGGLINGLY BIG IT IS.** _

 

Skypeia is like nothing Chopper has ever seen before.

Well, before joining the crew, he hadn’t seen much of anything that wasn’t Drum. But even so, he can tell that this is something new and special – a collection of varyingly sized space stations, protected from the nebula by two layers of a giant, shining forcefield makes up the main settlement. Shuttles dart rapidly between everything, and there are even a bunch of people in space suits with rocket packs floating around outside!

Conis is incredibly nice when she finds them drifting outside of her home, and feeds them a delicious lunch full of sweet things! She shows them the all the cool technology, and even tells them about the large asteroid that Cloud Colony, another smaller collection of ships, and the forcefields orbit.

It’s rare for anything to come through the nebula, in either direction, so they’re fairly cut off from the rest of the Galaxy, and though Cloud Colony has an aeroponics system for growing food that Sanji had come extremely close to having a nosebleed over, it’s difficult for them to get a lot of minerals. Most of the supply comes from scavenged junk that makes its way through the nebula, or the asteroid that Conis says is called “Vearth.”

Most of the population isn’t allowed there – apparently, it’s a place for god and his priests, which Chopper is choosing not to interpret literally.

Chopper’s herd had been pretty typical for their kind. One or two of the bigger, faster members took charge sometimes in emergencies, but most decisions were made by the herd, for the good of the herd. He’d been unusual for even _wanting_ to leave the herd, to say nothing of the blue nose that left more superstitious herdmates uncomfortable.

But the Skypeians seem more like humans, with a pretty strict hierarchy. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, Chopper thinks, but he can’t help but wonder if physically separating out the outcasts and the very important from the general population is such a good idea.

A few hours later, smelling Conis’s guilt before the Merry is suddenly towed quickly into an electromagnetic field and dragged uncomfortably quickly towards Vearth without half the crew, Chopper doesn’t wonder anymore: it’s definitely a terrible idea.

He clings to Zoro and listens to Nami swear at the controls as she tries and fails to change their trajectory, and works very hard on not panicking.

 

* * *

 

Zoro is surprised to find there’s a reasonable amount of atmosphere on the asteroid. Merry seems pretty beat up by their less-than-graceful descent into that atmosphere, but her shields are mostly intact. Whatever technology is keeping the air close to the atmosphere has also made it breathable – he’s not as surprised about that, none of them had any real trouble with the air that Conis and her father breathed.

Whoever grabbed their ship and dragged them down here hasn’t seen fit to show themselves in the last five minutes, so Zoro mentally shrugs and works on examining their surroundings more closely.

The Merry is on top of some ancient-looking machinery, presumably the source of the whole dragging through space thing. Actually, everything around them seems pretty ancient, outdated materials which have been covered in thick moss and enormous trees. The machinery is tall, rising up out of a lake of something that smells vaguely corrosive – Zoro’s really not looking to go leaping into it anytime soon, at any rate – and the walls that surround the lake look pretty smooth and tall, so even if they could swim to the edges climbing out might be next to impossible.

“Fascinating,” a voice next to his ear says, and he very carefully neither jumps or yells. Robin has silently appeared behind him sometime in the last two minutes, and the fact that he hadn’t noticed is honestly a bit worrying. Either his subconscious has written her off as “not a threat” already (unlikely), or she’s actually far more of a threat than he’d originally clocked her as (unacceptable).

She doesn’t seem to have noticed, though, too focused on the ruins around them.

Nami and Chopper exit Merry more slowly, both of them nervous and panicky about having been ripped away from their friends, and it shows. Nami in particular is trying to cover up her fear with explosive anger (also a genuine emotion she seems to be having – not being able to steer is something she takes as a personal insult).

Once all four of them are gathered in front of the ship, a voice booms out of nowhere – no, wait, there’s a Skypeian on the back of a giant bird, he’s the one speaking.

“OUTSIDERS, YOU HAVE DARED ENTER SKYPEIA. AS PUNISHMENT FOR THIS HORRENDOUS CRIME, YOU ARE NOW ENTERED IN THE SURVIVAL GAME. YOUR CO-CONSPIRATORS WILL HAVE TWELVE HOURS TO REACH YOU, AND THEN YOU WILL BE SACRIFIED. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LEAVE THE ALTER.”

Zoro’s skin prickles unpleasantly at the word “game” and he notices for the first time that there are a few cameras floating around – they’re dated in design, but seem functional enough.

Nami and Chopper cling to each other, shaking a bit.

“What do you suppose happens if we leave the alter?” Robin asks, curiously, and Zoro finds himself shooting her a grin he suspects is less threatening than he intended.

“Wanna find out?”

 

* * *

 

“Survival game?” Sanji asks for the third time, biting down hard on his unlit cigarette as Usopp steers their borrowed shuttle and Luffy presses his face against the window to watch the asteroid get bigger as they approach. “Fuck do these people think they are? Nothing about survival is a _game._ ”

Usopp knows Sanji is carrying some baggage about this. They all know about one another, at least a little. No one talks about it, mostly, unless – as was the case with getting Nami’s home planet freed – the baggage is currently presenting itself to be met with Luffy’s declaration that he was gonna kick its ass. But Merry is a small ship and they’re a small, tight-knit crew and even if you don’t know the details you know what it is that makes your crewmates go stiff and focus very carefully on their breathing.

No one goes hungry on Sanji’s watch. Usopp’s never really questioned it, but it’s also not particularly a change for him. He grew up in a small village where everyone made sure everyone else had enough. Sanji doesn’t really go after him the way he does some of the others – scolding Luffy for not eating enough vegetables, unobtrusively leaving glasses of water within easy reach but in no danger of spilling on anything important when Nami’s engrossed in her charts, or practically throwing high-calorie foods at Zoro after the first mate finishes a workout or a fight.

He reaches back without looking and manages to awkwardly pat the cook on the shoulder.

“Even if it was,” he offers, “we’re gonna win.”

Sanji doesn’t respond, but that’s mostly because Luffy catapults himself between them and points at the screen showing what’s ahead of them.

“Look at those mystery tunnels, guys! Haha, isn’t this so cool?! Ooooh, that one looks like fun, pick that one Usopp!”

Usopp follows Luffy’s pointing finger and sees that the tunnel in question is labeled **ORDEAL OF BALLS.**

Since this doesn’t sound nearly as bad as the other three, he sighs and steers them through it without much complaint.

 

* * *

 

Nami’s having a truly terrible day. Not only is most of her crew either unconscious around her or unconscious back on the ship, but the ruler of this whole fucking mess is certifiably _insane._

At least all his priests are dead, finally, and she’s still mostly unscathed, thanks to the waver – not for the first time today, she silently thanks Conis’s dad for fixing up the tiny, versatile shuttle for her.

Enel crackles with electricity, rising up towards the heavens slowly but steadily. Robin had recognized what he was, but no one else could pronounce the word she’d called him. Apparently he eats electric energy, in addition to using it to fight (to devastating effect, see also: all her unconscious crewmates), and he’d spent the twenty minutes they were alone explaining how his ultimate plan to destroy the forcefields protecting Skypeia from the dangers of the nebula it floated within and absorb enough power to truly become a god in power as well as in title could finally succeed now that he had finished working half a hundred Skypeians half to death mining the precious minerals that had adorned the complex and ancient ruins within Vearth.

(Robin had also called Enel a very unpleasant word, this one which Nami _could_ pronounce, when she found out where his materials were coming from.)

Nami isn’t sure what it is about her that makes people want to go all cartoon-villain this-is-my-villanous-plot-mwa-ha-ha when she’s a captive audience, but she’d really like it to stop.

She swerves hard to dodge a falling rock the size of her head, yells at her captain to hang on tight, and pulls the waver into as steep a climb as it can manage while still in Vearth’s artificial atmosphere.

Luffy’s weird rubber body has turned out to be completely immune to Enel’s electric attacks, and getting him close enough to punch the maniac’s lights out seems to be the only hope for saving everyone within the forcefield from certain death.

Gunning the engine as hard as she can, Nami lines the trajectories up in her head, knows she can get him there. After that, it’s all on Luffy.

She’s a little surprised to realize, after the fact, that she hadn’t been worried that he would fail at all.

 

* * *

 

They win, bring peace and solid ground to two nations who have spent countless generations locked in ever-orbiting ships, have a huge party, and steal a bunch of treasure and sneak out before everyone else wakes up.

Conis shows them how to use Enel’s creepy teleportation technology to leave Skypeia, and even the horrifying sensation of freefalling for two hours doesn’t change the fact that, all told, it’s a great bonding experience.

 

* * *

 

The ghost ship appears at 0300 Station Standard Time.

Jim means “appears” literally. G8 is a goddamned fortress of a space station, the second most secure location in the system, and one of the most secure in the whole Grand Line. Night watch is usually incredibly boring, because first of all, no one is stupid enough to attack a Marine base that’s nicknamed “The Hedgehog” and secondly, there’s a fucking forcefield around the whole thing that only opens at certain times and requires two people in two different offices to enter codes at the same time. There’s no way a pirate ship could just _sneak in_ to the empty space the two rings of G8 circle around, particularly not one as beat up as this one. Besides, he was watching the whole time: it wasn’t there one minute, and was definitely present the next.

He reaches out a shaking hand and taps the monitor. The ship doesn’t disappear. The skull painted on it grins cheerfully at him.

Jim preforms his duties admirably: he does not faint until after he’s pressed the button that will raise the alarm.

 

* * *

 

_Did you hear about the ghost ship?_

Jessica has heard about the ghost ship. She has heard about the ghost ship from basically everyone working in the kitchens, because for some reason she seems to be running gossip central instead of _do our jobs and feed all these hungry Marines a nutritious and tasty meal_ central. She turns to scold the chef whose whisper she’s picked out of the noisy chaos of the kitchen and finds him talking to someone new.

This is unusual, since no one without her approval cooks in her kitchen. The new guy is blond, and doesn’t look like much in his standard-issue chef’s uniform. He’s respectfully not touching anything, but she can tell he’s aware of everything happening around him, itching to start cooking something. She recognizes the look.

“-came out of nowhere! Just appeared in our harbor, without setting off any of the alarms or anything, and it’s beat to hell and back! The guys who investigated all say it was totally empty, but it still felt like they were being watched at every turn – things would move when no one was looking at them, it sounds impossible but it’s true!”

Jessica steps up behind her chef and clears her throat pointedly. He jumps a gratifying full foot into the air and starts stammering apologies.

“Well, Chef, these two are the new guys from HQ, here to…” She doesn’t really care, and tunes the rest of it out. More hands mean more mouths, of course, but hands in the kitchen are welcome – _if_ they know what they’re doing. She looks around again and notices a second guy in a busboy uniform who she doesn’t recognize.

The blond follows her gaze and gives her a smile that he clearly thinks is charming. (He’s right, but she’s married and doesn’t approve of flirting on the job, besides.) “He’s my assistant, really.”

Jessica narrows her eyes at the both of them. The busboy stares back, picking his nose. Just as well that one won’t be cooking, then.

“You want to cook in my kitchen?” She asks, hands on her hips. “HQ is a cakewalk compared to a working base. We feed more than a thousand Marines three square meals a day, in shifts with a 10 minute break to clean the cafeteria. Everything is fresh, everything is nutritious, nothing is wasted. You think you’re up for that?”

His grin widens and he starts to look genuinely excited as she shoves an apron at him and says, “Prove it.”

 

* * *

 

Vice Admiral Jonathan is very sure that this isn’t a ghost ship. For one thing, most ghosts don’t drink hot chocolate, and they certainly don’t abandon their tea party just because their ship got boarded.

There are seven cups, none of them matching, still steaming on the dining room table. Opening the refrigeration unit reveals a particular cheese that Jonathan happens to know is only sold on Jaya, mostly because it’s the secret ingredient to his wife’s incredibly popular macaroni and cheese special and justifying the requisition of more than 40 kilos of it is always a pain unless there’s a ship coming from that direction already.

He pulls out his communicator and flips through the handy file of pirate symbols HQ put together and keeps updated, trying to find the jolly roger to match the one painted on the outside of the ship and on a black flag tacked up on the wall over a desk full of medical supplies and a couple honest-to-goodness physical books.

_A-ha._ Clicking on the surprisingly-friendly looking skull with the straw hat produces two bounty posters and a “stolen property” alert which Jonathan pulls a face at upon opening, since the face on it matches one of the bounty posters. He’s never liked the slave trade, and particularly isn’t a fan of the ways the Marines engage with it.

So, this isn’t a ghost ship. Creepy whispering voices, giant furred monsters, and inexplicable appearance aside, it belongs to a crew of roughly seven people who were probably all still living and breathing two hours ago when the alarms went off, since their investigation hadn’t turned up any bodies.

It also hasn’t turned up any space suits or emergency shuttles, and Jonathan brushes his mustache absently as he heads back to the shuttle.

“Get this to one of the repair bays,” he tells his second-in-command, “and let the rumor keep going around that we think it’s a ghost ship. Maybe they’ll get comfortable and reveal themselves. Oh – and take the treasure.”

 

* * *

 

Usopp feels like he’s watching the Galaxy’s most stressful ping-pong ball match what with the amount of looking back and forth he’s doing. They’re all _so close_ to escaping, and jamming the electronics in the frankly excessive cuffs the Marines had crammed Zoro into had been _hard_ and Usopp hasn’t slept since their near-death experiences in the Nebula, ok? There’s no call for all these weird dramatic turns. Chopper, in his largest form, is pretending to be a berserker and threatening Nami and some lady who turned out to be the daughter of the cool old mechanic who’d patched up Merry. Luffy is being… Luffy, though slightly quieter than usual since he got caught in a kairoseki net. The head chef is angry at Sanji’s “betrayal” since he was a better chef than the actual two cooks HQ had sent over – also the head chef is married to the vice admiral in charge, plus the fact that all of these people are now yelling at each other – it’s a lot.

Some of the enlisted are getting in on the yelling as well, and there’s a lull in the general hubbub perfectly timed for everyone to hear some idiot yell, “-and that one’s the Child of the Devil! Inhuman monster! No one should have that many eyes!”

Robin, still looking fairly snazzy in her stolen uniform (Usopp guesses that poor Condoriano is probably free by now, but who knows - maybe they’ll believe that the real Sheppard is still out there somewhere), stiffens noticeably. Chopper’s nearly in tears despite not having tear ducts, Sanji looks about ready to explode, and Luffy doesn’t seem too happy either.

Surprisingly, though, it’s Zoro whose killing aura is the most tangible. He steps forward from their awkwardly clumped configuration (Nami’s trying to cut Luffy out of the kairoseki net with limited success, and the rest of them are providing poor cover from the veritable sea of Marines between them and Merry) and draws a single sword, pointing it in the direction the comment came from.

“Whoever said that isn’t gonna have _any_ eyes,” Zoro says, and leaps headfirst into the sea of Marines because _he’s an idiot._ Robin’s looking kind of stunned, though, so at least he’s their idiot.

There’s more indistinguishable yelling, and Usopp suddenly remembers all the talk of _The Demon of the East Blue_ he’d heard as a kid and honestly right on up until they’d left Loguetown. Zoro’s only a year or two older than him, and had earned the title pretty quickly, and Usopp has never really given it much thought but what must that do to a kid, to be told all you’re good for is fighting, and then be feared and rejected when you’re good at that?

Then the Marines get their bearings back and Usopp is too busy to pay attention to that to worry much about the traumatic backstories of his crewmates.

 

* * *

 

Nami is livid. They’ve finally gotten back to the Merry, are on their way to freedom, and now this?

How _dare_ these Marines take her, er, her _crew’s_ hard-stolen treasure? Most of it wasn’t even taken from Government territory – hell, Skypeia’s not even on any of the charts. Just because they’re wanted pirates doesn’t mean other people can steal their loot – the nerve!

This clearly has to be rectified. Nami takes a deep breath, gets her emotions slightly more under control (or at least under the surface) and flips the switch for the intercom.

“Hold onto your butts, guys, we’re gonna make a quick detour.”

 

* * *

 

“Checkmate,” Jonathan says, setting down the last piece on the chessboard as Straw Hat and his redheaded pilot come crashing through the window to his office on the tiniest shuttle he’s ever seen. Fortunately, the emergency shields backing up the window kick in quickly, and no one is hurtled out into the void.

Straw Hat just grins, wide and friendly, says “Thank you for keeping our gold safe, old guy! We’re gonna take it back and go now!”

Jonathan smiles back, bemused. “Oh? I think you’ll find you’ll have some trouble with that. You see, I’ve got all I need to send you to the brig.”

At the cue, the two squadrons waiting behind the various doors leading into the office (including four guys crammed into his closet – Jonathan’s not sure why that was tactically necessary but they seem pleased with themselves) burst into action and level their laser rifles at the pirates. Straw Hat’s grin doesn’t fade.

“Nah,” he says, gathering up all the treasure into a sack and hefting it onto his back, “You don’t have a Nami.”

The contained thunderstorm is, indeed, very educational, Jonathan considers, laying on the ground a short while later. He’s pretty sure his mustache is smoking. They’ll still have to make it through the forcefield, though, and even if they manage that Jonathan still wins, because now he knows where the few remaining holes in his protocols are, his soldiers all got some sorely-needed exercise, and he can put the incident in his next report to HQ and they’ll have to acknowledge that it’s worth continuing to fund G8.

All in all, not a bad day’s work.

 

* * *

 

It turns out, it’s pretty easy to remote open a forcefield when one of your crew spent a day impersonating a Marine Inspector and investigating the base and some of the staff liked another one enough to agree to input one of the necessary codes. It’s even easier when you have someone who can input the other code with a spare hand without even needing to be in the second room.

Probably the vice admiral should add safeguards against that to his protocols, but honestly – how often do these things happen?

 

* * *

 

_Whoever said that isn’t gonna have **any** eyes._

It’s not Robin wonders where the swordsman comes from – he was pretty famous, back in the East Cluster, even if you didn’t pay attention to the fights. How could he not be? A tragic story, alarming ambition, and the fact that he just kept winning, even when he obviously wasn’t supposed to all added up to the kind of gladiator it was pretty impossible to ignore even if he didn’t share your home system.

(They called him a demon, with a sort of pride, and never stopped to consider the fact that his only sins had been being from a poor settlement on a poorer world and having a dream.)

What are less well known are the circumstances of his, um, retirement from the arena and first foray into a life of crime following Luffy out into space.

The navigator thinks the captain stole him, the way she used to (and still does) steal information and precious jewels and anything else of value not nailed down firmly enough. Long-nose-kun maintains that the captain ended up in the fights somehow, and the swordsman got them out, because he’s always pulling the captain out of trouble (literally more often than metaphorically, actually) and wouldn’t it make sense to have started out the way they ended up carrying on? The doctor is mostly just sort of in awe of the first mate, who acts like a particularly indulgent older brother to the fuzzy creature, and generally doesn’t understand the concept of gossip anyway, so he’s not really a good person to ask for theories.

Robin does anyway, of course, because it pays to be thorough, and although she doesn’t get anything useful she’s bemusedly touched by the surprisingly vitriolic words their doctor holds for the people in charge of the swordsman’s health in the past. She manages to get him distracted with some chocolate and a side question about the best technique for stitching up large wounds without leaving “enormous gaping scars, Robin, the one on his shoulder is two centimeters deep those _assholes!”_

The captain, of course, knows, and so does the swordsman himself, but she’s certainly not about to ask the later even if he has warmed up to her some, and the former’s only answer is to grin, laugh, and declare proudly that “he said yes!”

No, surprisingly, it seems to be the cook who knows something approaching the full truth outside of the two of them. She can see it in his expression, deadly serious in a way he doesn’t often wear around the ladies of the crew – or out of battle, for that matter. It’s in the way he sets down the knife he’s using to chop greens (she and the navigator will likely get a delicate salad later, but she’s pretty sure most of these are bound for some kind of soup or sauce, where he can hide them from the crew members who aren’t as fond of vegetables), the way his shoulders roll back and he exhales a cloud of smoke from the flameless cigarettes he uses off-planet.

He actually leaves the counter, joins her at the table that’s not quite big enough for the seven of them, and pours himself a cup of the tea he’s already served her. She’s almost starting to worry, because this is possibly the longest time the cook has ever spent alone in her presence without a dopey smile on his face, when he looks her dead in the eyes and says, “It’s really not my place.”

“Oh?” she hedges, raising her mug and sipping at the tea, which is of course the perfect strength and temperature.

“Look, I don’t care about his feelings or whatever. If he has them.”

He’s a terrible liar, how he ever managed to fool Crocodile is a mystery for the ages. She raises an eyebrow at him, and he practically wilts. 

“It’s not embarrassing, it’s not anything bad – or, well, it is bad I guess. But it’s his life, and to him it’s a closed chapter, you know? Parents left him, dead best friend, horrifying childhood spent literally fighting for his life for the amusement of others, yada-yada. How he left it isn’t important, it’s that he’s going to do something with the rest of his life.”

The cook stops there, sips at his tea. Robin waits him out, knows in her bones that it’s not the end, and is rewarded when a slightly subdued version of the dopey smile he wears around her and the navigator is cast down at the table.

“He’s going to do something great.”

Robin smiles back, murmurs something agreeable, and resolves to put a lid on her curiosity until some other time, at least on this subject.

She’s just figured out something far more interesting, anyway.

 

* * *

 

“So, when’d she earn it?” Sanji asks, while Zoro’s chewing on the last of the pasta he’d brought up.

Zoro glares at him, but doesn’t pretend he doesn’t know what Sanji’s talking about, which is good because he doesn’t have time to kick the marimo’s ass right now.

“One of the stupid priest guys, the one who got Chopper – she was genuinely upset about the fact that Chopper was hurt. And then she protected him when it mattered.” He shrugs, the motion a little awkward given his position slumped against the base of the console. “She was upset about them breaking the ruins, too, but she broke one getting Chopper out of the way.”

It takes Sanji a second, because even after all this time (it hasn’t even been a year, really, but it feels longer. Relativity, or something.) he doesn’t speak fluent Emotionally Stunted Moron. But he gets it, eventually, and lets out a satisfied hum at receiving an answer.

Zoro grumbles something about stupid questions, but he sticks another forkful of pasta into his mouth without needing to be needled into finishing his meal and so Sanji doesn’t call him on it.

 

* * *

 

The less said about the tiny moon they land on after escaping a _Marine base_ , the better, Usopp thinks, pausing in scribbling down the notes on his tablet in the file labeled **The Great Adventures of the Greater Usopp (and friends)**.

It oscillates between an accurate account of what had happened and blatant lies. Since entering the Grand Line, though, it’s been getting more and more true, because even Usopp is struggling to come up with things more ridiculous than what has actually happened. Eaten by a space whale? Sure, he could probably come up with that, but not with his captain promising to find the space whale’s friends and bring back news of them once they’d traversed the entire Grand Line. Met a princess whose home was in grave danger? OK, but what about adopting one of the interstellar assassins who had been threatening it as a member of their crew, edging towards good friend, right after defeating her organization?

Sighing, Usopp notes down the bare bones of what had happened – the rules of the Davy Back Fight, which crew members were won how, the _brilliance_ of the power of the afro, the presence of a freaking _Admiral_ on a tiny nowhere moon, apparently just to speak with them and make a token effort at bringing in their three wanted members.

(Apparently accidentally breaking into a Marine base tends to give the Marines more information on just who is in your crew so they can file existing bounties in properly. Who knew, right?)

It turns out that not only have Luffy and Zoro’s bounties increased since Alabasta, Robin’s has resurfaced since she’s been confirmed alive.

Aokiji had thrown out the details of her bounty, flung them at the crew like so many icy barbs and Usopp didn’t – _doesn’t_ – understand. Robin’s bounty has never increased, she’s had it since she was nine, and it’s _huge_. Not as big as Luffy’s new one after defeating a warlord, but she’s still worth more than Zoro, who’s been caught on camera _cutting living steel_ yet still isn’t worth more as a pirate than he is as stolen property. Even with the powers she’s inherited from her non-human parent (something else Aokiji had tossed into consideration, expression never changing from ‘recently woken up and kinda grumpy about it’) Usopp is pretty sure their first mate could do a hell of a lot more damage. He doesn’t understand why she’s such a threat.

Who cares if every organization she’s ever joined has collapsed, who cares if she’s been the only one to escape every time? Luffy’s right, they’re stronger than that, even if she does want to leave them behind.

He scowls down at the sloppy lines, saves, and closes the file. He’s not going to add his speculation in here. It’s the kind of thing that belongs firmly in his head and not his written record, like the way Zoro’s spine had gone ramrod straight and his eyes had gone tight even as he backed Luffy’s decision to enter the Davy Back Fight, or Robin’s frozen expression as she was, well, frozen.

Some things are just a little too private, aren’t meant to go into the stories.

 

* * *

 

“Land ho!” comes Usopp’s enthusiastic shout over the intercom, quickly followed by “wait, no, some weird track things ho! Nami, can you come look at this?”

Naturally, at the word “weird,” Luffy’s attention is fully captured, and he dashs off to see what’s happening, tugging Chopper and Zoro along behind him.

“Hey Usopp! Show us the weird track things!” he yells, bursting into the tiny room. It’s already occupied by Usopp, sitting at the single chair, and Nami, leaning over his shoulder, as they squint at one of the monitors.

Zoro is griping behind him, but is distracted pretty quickly by the arrival of Sanji and Robin, and cook and first mate are quickly completely sidetracked by arguing over something else. Usually Luffy would care more, their fights are cool! But right now, there is a mystery to be investigated!

Usopp looks up to find the entire crew smushed into the doorway, and sighs. He points at some fuzzy-looking lines on the screen. “They’re for a train, I think – you see them sometimes on bigger planets with more than one settlement – Syrup didn’t have any, but some of the books in Kaya’s library had pictures of fancy-looking ones.”

Luffy stretches his neck out to get a better look at the display. He’s never heard of these “train” things, but there are two lines side by side, connected every so often by thinner lines.

“OK, but what do they do?” He wonders aloud, and Robin answers.

“On land, tracks like that guide something like chains of ships, very quickly. You can’t steer them off the track, but if you’re just trying to make a very fast connection for shipping between two places, they’re very useful.”

“Coool~” Luffy grins, and pokes Nami insistently in the shoulder, “Hey, Nami, can we follow them? If they go between places, and someone made these, then the mystery lines will take us to one of those places, right?”

Nami makes a dubious noise, which is disappointing, because Luffy’s kind of excited about the mystery lines now that he’s thinking about what might be on the end.

“I don’t know, Luffy,” she says, “Merry’s not doing so well, remember what that guy Usopp met on G8 said? We’d be better off going to the next planet we have a read o-“

This is, naturally, when they nearly get run over by a train, saved only by Usopp’s panicked warning squawk and Nami’s quick reflexes. The lady driving the train is super nice, though, and points out which direction they’d be most likely to get Merry fixed in, which is at one end of the mystery lines!

Luffy really likes when adventures just present themselves like this, and he’s still giggling excitedly as they descend into Water7’s atmosphere.

 

* * *

 

Iceburg has been mayor of this planet for nearly ten years now. He’s seen weathered three times as many Aqua Lagunas, built countless beautiful spaceships and a few truly ugly ones (that’s a lie – he knows exactly how many ships he’s sent out into the black without even needing to check Galley La’s records). He runs a company of crazy people and his adoptive brother is even crazier.

He’s used to the everyday disasters of his position. He’s even used to the more unusual disasters. Today, though. Today has been disaster on top of even bigger disaster, and he doesn’t even have the energy to be truly angry about the fact that he nearly died, he’s too busy being upset about everything he didn’t see coming and couldn’t prevent.

It had started with the pretty redhead who’d practically sent Paulie into conniptions, driving a hard bargain while her curly-haired crewmate asked intelligent questions and their barefoot captain poked his fingers into absolutely everything with a huge grin on his face. And then Franky’s gang had done something stupid, and gotten their asses kicked, and then they’d done something stupider, and one of the most wanted women in the galaxy had appeared, and it had really all gone downhill from there. Fucking Cipher Pols.

The mouse in his pocket crawls up onto his shoulder, squeaking quietly and twitching its whiskers in a way Iceburg usually finds reliable as a recipe for cheering up. It’s not really working right now, but he gives it a scratch under the chin anyway, and looks past the storm that makes liftoff impossible at the Space Train tracks and the trail left hanging over them by the Rocket Man.

A voice scratches at the back of his mind, and he turns, squinting through the lashing rain to find its source.

_Help them? Please, I want-_

The ghostly figure outlined in water droplets wrings its vague hands together in distress, and Iceburg looks up to see the Strawhat’s ship hovering in the next dry dock over.

“Your core’s damaged,” he tells it, as gently as he knows how. For the soul of a ship to reveal itself to a stranger is unusual, it must be desperate. “Even if you could make it through the storm, even if you make it to Ennis Lobby – you won’t be able to come back. We- I can’t fix that.”

Merry wavers, then firms up.

_Don’t care._ It says, reaching out to tug at him. _Help them. They’re **mine.**_

Wincing, Iceburg wraps presses a hand into his bandaged gunshot wound, and staggers towards the ship, dragging his tools behind him. The spirit rushes to help.

  

* * *

 

Sanji likes to think of himself as one of the few realists on the crew. Usopp and Nami have a tendency to wind themselves up and panic at the first signs of adversity, and Robin is morbidly pessimistic at the best of times, even though he’s 95% sure that she’s usually joking. On the other end of the spectrum is the unsinkable optimism that Luffy practically exudes from his pores. Chopper tends to oscillate between panicking with Usopp and Nami and trusting their captain when he says it’s all gonna be fine, but the fuzzy creature is definitely more grounded than everyone else in terms of health care.

(Zoro is… kind of difficult to categorize, since he doesn’t really seem to believe in the existence of a problem he can’t stubborn and/or brute-force his way through and is generally content to follow Luffy’s crazy plans regardless of possible consequences. Sanji finds this steadiness annoyingly comforting, so he usually just aggressively doesn’t think about it.)

Right now, though, he’s leaning as hard as he can into optimism, because he can’t accept that Robin’s betrayed them. Besides overhearing some crucial details and the info Usop- uh, Sogeking, sure, whatever – had brought from Nami, Robin’s own claim about darkness too great for them all to deal with had rung… flat.

She’s always kept them at a distance, but the distance has been shrinking, especially since Skypeia. She’s gone gradually but steadily from using her powers only when she had to, to casually lending him a hand or five in the kitchen, playfully freaking Chopper out by whispering from seven places at once, and not bothering to stick to the typical two eyes.

He’s seen her read adventure stories softly to Luffy, slip Chopper half of her desserts, coolly goad Zoro into a brilliant blush that clashes horrifically with his green hair, hold parts steady for Usopp’s gadgets, and tuck Nami gently into bed when the navigator falls asleep over her calculations. Zoro trusts her, for fuck’s sake, and Sanji is pretty sure that makes the first time ever in the swordsman’s life that the number of people he trusts can’t be counted on one hand.

If she wanted to be rid of them, she shouldn’t have slotted in so well, Sanji thinks, and grits his teeth down on nothing, unable to smoke safely in a spacesuit while sneaking around on the roof of a train speeding through space (he’s trying very, very hard not to think about it).

He takes a moment, breathes in and out the way Zeff taught him, shifts his grip on the roof, and _jumps,_ breaking inside with all the force he can muster.

He doesn’t wait for the red warning lights to stop flashing: he grew up on a space station, can handle himself in a fight with a hull breach, and besides the Space Train has some seriously fast emergency seals.

By the time it’s safe for Sanji to hit the button to remove his helmet, there’s only one Marine left conscious, and Sanji’s foot is inches from burying itself in the poor goon’s face. He pulls it back, a bit, clearly into a windup, and asks just the once:

“Where’s my crewmate?”


End file.
